High school students! The application process for Nick’s Interns is now open. Spend 3 weeks this summer working with either the King Range BLM in Whitethorn, or the MRC in Petrolia. Not only will you be learning great new skills, but these are paid positions that will look great on your resume and college applications. More info and application here: http://www.mattole.org/programs/education/nicks-interns/

THIS EVENT HAS BEEN CANCELLED DUE TO ROAD CLOSURES AND INCLEMENT WEATHER.

Sorry for the inconvenience. We will keep you updated on future rescheduling. Stay safe and dry.

Please join the Mattole Restoration Council and the UC Cooperative Extension for a community meeting on the current status of sudden oak death (SOD). The presentation will be followed by a Q & A session and field training to teach participants how to identify SOD symptoms and collect their own samples for SOD verification.
If you suspect to have SOD infected trees on your property, feel free to bring leaf/twig samples for lab testing.

If you are interested in running for our Board, please feel free to contact us for more information

2:00 Membership meeting

We invite you to discuss ideas, questions, or concerns regarding our current and future priorities and projects

If you would like additional information, please feel free to contact Cassie at 707-629-3514 or cassie@mattole.org

Directions

To get to us via 101 from the north:
Take the Redway Exit and proceed 1.8 miles into Redway. Turn right at the Briceland-Thorn road (sign says “Shelter Cove, Kings Range”). Proceed 5.7 miles on the Briceland-Thorn Rd. Turn right just before the Briceland Township sign onto the Cemetery Road and proceed up the hill a short way.

To get to us via 101 from the south:
Take the Garberville Exit (639A) and proceed through downtown Garberville (Redwood Drive). Continue on Redwood Drive for 3.0 miles into Redway. Turn left at the Briceland-Thorn road (sign says “Shelter Cove, Kings Range”). Proceed 5.7 miles on the Briceland-Thorn Rd. Turn right just before the Briceland Township sign onto the Cemetery Road and proceed up the hill a short way.

The MRC is reviewing the Van Auken/Arken Timber Harvest Plan (THP) 1-16-081HUM through the public comment process. This is a big plan, especially considering the type of activities that are proposed. The forests are barely beginning to recover with trees averaging 55-70 years old. The landowner, Boyle (Barnum), has proposed harvesting over 500 acres that will pockmark the landscape in tributary watersheds in the Mattole headwaters with some units in the Eel River watershed. There are 36 units total, with almost 200 ac

Photo Credit: Galen Doherty, Sanctuary Forest

res being clearcut and another 100 being rehabilitated. This will mean almost 300 acres of cleared ground when operations are completed. The entire plan will use tractors or ground-based equipment to remove logs with an option to use cable yarding. Other flags include multiple stream crossings, some steep slopes, and the use of herbicides.

The MRC urges the public to comment on this plan. The process is still open for public comment as of March 2017. Check back here for updates. To understand the public comment process, go to the CAL FIRE website here:

Several of the tributaries: Van Arken, McKee and Ravashoni are part of a campaign by Sanctuary Forest to purchase the property for conservation. The forests and the entire Van Arken tributary would be protected into the future nurturing salmon, amphibians, and forest creatures for all of us. MRC cannot stress enough the importance of this project to our watershed. For more information, please go here:

The morning sun rose over the golden hills of the Mattole Valley promising a beautiful day for the annual California Coastal Cleanup.

On Friday, September 16, the Mattole Restoration Council (MRC) teamed up with the Mattole and Honeydew schools to participate in the largest volunteer event in the state of California. This event was the 3rd consecutive year that the MRC has combined forces with the local schools to participate in the cleanup and, once again, it proved to be a success. With almost 60 volunteers, students and adults paired into teams to scour the beaches near McNutt Gulch and collected over 176 pounds of trash! Some particularly interesting items were discovered including a crab trap, some metal sheet roofing and some large plastic objects with Japanese writing on them.

The 2015 California Coastal Cleanup efforts resulted in the collection of 1,142,977 pounds of trash from beaches all over the state and in Humboldt County a total of 13,435 pounds of marine debris were removed from our local beaches. Keeping our beaches clean is not only important to preserve the natural beauty of our coastline but is also vital to prevent harm to marine wildlife. These animals (and even people!) can be harmed and sometimes killed by marine debris in various ways including entanglement, ingestion and the disruption of their natural habitat. Every piece of trash that is collected and removed from our beaches can potentially save an animal’s life. So hats off to each and every volunteer that participated in this year’s Coastal Cleanup and we look forward to seeing you out there again next year!

From my office window I’m watching the massive, double blade helicopter ‘Chinook’ land in the staging field. Over the next two days, local crews led by the Mattole Salmon Group, in partnership with BLM, will oversee the placement of 200 whole, intact large trees in the Mattole Estuary. These trees will provide much needed habitat for fish, and will be added to the 200 trees that were placed in 2013. The trees come from the adjacent hillside, and are donated by the landowner to reduce Douglas fir encroachment of his grazing area- which means this is also helping to reclaim grasslands. Why a helicopter? This helicopter can carry an entire tree- root wad, branches, and trunk- unlike other heavy equipment. This whole tree provides the complexity that fish need, and helps the tree stay lodged in the Estuary for longer than a simple log. This means almost no hardware to anchor it, no large boulders trucked into the Mattole, and no need for extensive logging roads to access the trees. Also, helicopters can place a tree in a matter of minutes– which means that more wood is placed in a matter of days that we’ve had placed in decades of work.

For more about this and all the other work being done in the Estuary, see http://www.mattolesalmon.org/programs/habitat/restoration/estuary/ and information on the last round of heli-wood: http://www.mattole.org/news/mattole-river-estuary-project-update/.

If you are local, you can watch the helicopter while enjoying hot dogs and hamburgers at the viewing point on Lighthouse Road today (Monday Sept 19), and Prosper Ridge tomorrow (Tuesday Sept 20) from 11am-2pm.

Join us for our Hoop House Hoedown! We’re planning a perfect, outdoor summer evening of delicious BBQ, live music, kids activities, nursery tours, raffle prizes, and more. This exciting event will celebrate the grand opening of our new native plant nursery, and all proceeds will directly benefit the nursery.

6:00-9:30 Live music with Thursday Night Bluegrass and the P-town Freaks – upstream funk, perfect for dancing in the summer breeze, as recently reviewed ‘enough to flirt your Nana out to the dance floor’

8:30 Raffle for a year’s supply of Gold Rush Coffee (buy your raffle tickets at the event or here: http://www.mattole.org/news/coffee/) and a live auction with great items including a pallet of Gardner and Bloom Blue Ribbon soil, a rack of locally smoked bacon, a $200 gift card to Lost Coast Nursery, and more!

Our Earth Day volunteer event was postponed…our new date is May 23rd! Join us at the Mattole Valley Community Center at 9am on Monday, May 23. From there, we’ll walk as a group down to our native grass farm and spend the morning (until noon) weeding, and tending the grasses. To further celebrate Earth Day, we’ll send everyone home with a Mattole native tree to plant.